Install Plugin

Description

Sidebar dashboard for to-dos and notes: Today / Next workday / Later buckets with drag-and-drop rescheduling, your recently opened notes, and notes pinned with 📌 in the title.

Additional Information

Links:	Repository Homepage View source
Maintainers:	janst
Version:	1.0.0
Minimum app version:	3.0
Downloads: This version:	7
Last updated:	2026-10-08T17:39:50Z

Note Dashboard for Joplin

A sidebar panel for Joplin desktop that shows the notes and to-dos you need right now. Click any entry to open its note. Drag a row onto one of the three to-do sections to reschedule it.

Website: https://janst123.github.io/joplin-plugin-note-dashboard/

Install

From Joplin (recommended): go to Tools → Options → Plugins (on macOS, Joplin → Settings → Plugins), search for Note Dashboard and click Install. Restart Joplin when asked.

Manually: download de.jan8.notedashboard.jpl from the npm package (it's in publish/). Then go to Plugins → ⚙ → Install from file.

Use View → Toggle Note Dashboard to show or hide the panel.

Sections

#	Section	Contents
1	Today	Open to-dos that are overdue, or due at/before today's 18:00 cutoff. Overdue entries sort first with a red badge.
2	Next workday · <day>	Due after today's cutoff, up to the next workday's cutoff. The heading names the actual weekday.
3	Later	Due beyond that, plus to-dos with no due date (shown last, marked no date).
4	Recently opened	The last 4 notes or to-dos you opened.
5	Pinned	Any note whose title contains 📌 — to-dos and plain notes.

Completed to-dos are hidden from every section. Trashed notes and sync conflict copies never appear.

Rescheduling by drag and drop

Drag any row onto one of the first three sections:

Drop target	Effect
Today	due today at 16:00
Next workday	due next workday at 08:00 — Friday drops land on Monday, not Saturday
Later	clears the due date; the to-do stays visible in Later as undated

Dragging a plain note into Today or Next workday converts it to a to-do (is_todo = 1) as well as setting the date. Notes can also be dragged in from Joplin's own note list, which publishes text/x-jop-note-ids. There is no confirmation step, and no undo.

Why the bands are shaped this way

The obvious spec — "Today = due within 8h, Tomorrow = 8–36h" — is broken, because those are rolling windows while today and tomorrow are calendar words. They disagree for 7 of 25 sampled time/due combinations. At 07:00 a to-do due today at 18:00 is 11h away and would show under Tomorrow.

It breaks worse at the drop targets, which are wall-clock: drop onto Today at 07:00 and you get 16:00, which is 9h away — so the row immediately jumps to the next section. That is the bug this design exists to avoid.

So both the section boundaries and the drop dates are anchored to the same calendar model, and the middle band runs to the next workday's cutoff rather than to tomorrow's. Otherwise a Friday drop (Monday 08:00) would land in Later. On a Friday that band also absorbs anything due Sat/Sun, so nothing is stranded.

npm test verifies the resulting invariant exhaustively: a to-do dropped on a section always lands in that section, across 400 consecutive days × every hour × all three buckets (28,800 cases, covering both DST transitions).

Known rough edges

Dropping on Today after 16:00 sets a time in the past, so the to-do is immediately overdue and Joplin may fire its alarm at once. It stays in Today, which is arguably the honest signal, but it is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight.
A to-do due this evening (after 18:00) appears under Next workday. That is the cost of the working-day cutoff; the badge shows the real time, so it is visible rather than misleading.
Dropping multiple notes at once works: Joplin's note list sends an array of IDs, and every note in it is rescheduled. There is no per-note confirmation, so a multi-select drag rewrites several due dates in one go.

How "recently opened" works

Joplin has no built-in recently-viewed history, so the plugin keeps its own. It listens to workspace.onNoteSelectionChange and records a note when it is selected on its own (a multi-note selection is a list operation, not a read). The list is persisted in a private plugin setting, so it survives restarts.

The section is empty on first run and fills in as you click around.
Up to 40 IDs are stored although only 4 are shown, so the section stays full even when recent entries get deleted or ticked off.

Refreshing

The panel redraws on note change, note selection, sync completion, alarm trigger, and a 60-second timer — the timer matters because the section boundaries are wall-clock times that pass without any activity in the app. Redraws are debounced and never overlap.

Development

npm install     # also builds, via the prepare hook
npm run dist    # -> publish/de.jan8.notedashboard.jpl
npm test        # section rules, drop round-trips, rendering

Layout

src/index.ts        Joplin wiring: panel, events, settings, commands, drop handling
src/dashboard.ts    Pure logic: calendar maths, bucketing, drop dates, rendering
src/webview.js      Click, keyboard and drag-and-drop inside the panel webview
src/webview.css     Styling, themed via Joplin's CSS variables
tests/              Assertions against src/dashboard.ts
api/                Joplin plugin API type stubs (from generator-joplin)

src/dashboard.ts deliberately imports nothing from api, which is what makes the rules testable without a running Joplin.

Tuning

Constants at the top of src/dashboard.ts — change and rebuild; they are not exposed as user settings:

Constant	Default	Meaning
`DAY_CUTOFF_HOUR`	18	End of the working day
`TODAY_DROP_HOUR`	16	Time set by a drop on Today
`NEXT_WORKDAY_DROP_HOUR`	8	Time set by a drop on Next workday
`RECENT_COUNT`	4	Rows in Recently opened
`PIN_EMOJI`	📌	Pin marker matched in titles

Note that todo_due is the alarm in Joplin, so every reschedule also moves the notification.

Implementation note

Section 5 scans note titles in JS rather than using the search API: Joplin's full-text search tokeniser drops symbols, so search?query=📌 returns nothing. One paginated pass over the note list feeds all five sections.

Note Dashboard